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Nicely done.

treefaceon Dear Dr. Stallman: An Open Letter

Perhaps this a silly question, but why don't you guys expand your campaigns to the US? Why the geographic limitation?

treefaceon The Nano Hummingbird: Even James Bond Would Be Jealous

Thank you for the information, sir.

treefaceon The Nano Hummingbird: Even James Bond Would Be Jealous

This post is painfully scarce on any real details and doesn't provide a link to a video of it in action, substituting quality for a joke image. If I could downvote, I would. Instead I'll just provide some alternate resources:

Video of Nano Hummingbird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WePgcg37I

Nano Hummingbird on AeroVironment, Inc's (the creator's) website: http://www.avinc.com/nano

An Engadget post on the thing (also lacking many expository details): http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/18/darpa-funded-nano-humming...

A Kurzweilai.net post on it (not many details here either): http://www.kurzweilai.net/nano-hummingbird-uav

treefaceon A drug that can make your old memories like new

Nice job...well done. I've just downloaded this and reposted it to min.us:

http://min.us/mvjf9pl

treefaceon A drug that can make your old memories like new

Does this exist somewhere that isn't behind a paywall? Or better yet...is there a good description anywhere of the methods used for the relative layman?

Edit: Ok I've been snooping around for articles on this and so far I've found these:

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/03/the-memory-virus...

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-enzyme-erases-long-term-...

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/mar2011/nimh-03.htm

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/70519/title/Enzym...

treefaceon Show HN: I taught myself PHP and built TweetPerView.com

As you continue your plunge into PHP, consider a super lightweight framework like CodeIgniter. Moving to a Model-View-Controller pattern early will turn you into a good developer a lot quicker.

treefaceon Show HN: I taught myself PHP and built TweetPerView.com

What framework are you using for PHP?

treefaceon Three Routes to Spaghetti-Free Javascript

Try jQuery's deferred events. It is, IMO, the most elegant actual-JavaScript solution to the problem I've seen.

treefaceon Three Routes to Spaghetti-Free Javascript

Yes, exactly. This is a great description of the new deferred events and methods.

treefaceon Google finally has a 404 page that isn't ugly

Yep here's what I see on our IE6 death machine:

http://i.imgur.com/bTXtn.png

treefaceon 2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)

I actually agree with you, but I have also yet to see a relatively inexpensive autopilot system that can successfully navigate all of the many horrible scenarios that could arise. We're probably already (or nearly) there tech-wise, but in the current Cessnas, you still need to be able to land and take off, and if there's even a minor crosswind on landing, this requires a very good bit of training and understanding of the technical limitations of the airplane. Not impossible for people to learn, but certainly a lot more difficult than "gas = go, break = stop, wheel left = turn left, wheel right = turn right".

As far as safety goes...I agree that personal flight has a great track record. But it's difficult to say if this would continue (absent a beautiful autopilot system) if we gave out pilot's licenses to 90% of 17 year olds and filled the sky with millions of small aircraft.

treefaceon 2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)

Righto...thanks for the explanation, and sorry for the confusion on my part.

treefaceon 2000 as Seen in 1910 (23 pics)

A Cessna 172 is no more complicated than an economy car.

Not trying to sound snarky here, but have you ever piloted an airplane? The pre-takeoff checks take a little while, require a good bit of technical expertise, and are absolutely required if you want to be pretty damn sure that your airplane won't fall out of the sky. Safety is, at times, overemphasized, but then again your car won't fall from the sky when it stalls.

treefaceon Wolfram Alpha doesn't "get it"

Where does it say he's mad at them? All he's saying is that this policy isn't very web-friendly.

treefaceon Whatever happened to 'Japan'?

"Little changes" from the perspective of a developer? I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one.

If I'm not mistaken (please correct me if I am), a plurality (if not an outright majority) of web servers are run using an open source OS. jQuery/Prototype/MooTools together hold an obscenely high share of the JavaScript library market. The great majority of websites on the internet run some combination of PHP, Python, Ruby, many of those running open-source frameworks like Pylons, RoR, CodeIgniter, Kohana, web2py, Django, etc. A great number of developers code using Vim, Eclipse, or some other open source text editor.

And from the perspective of the user? It's hard to quantify this just by saying "Firefox" or "Chrome" or the "V8 JavaScript Engine". I think open source projects (like jQuery) benefit hugely from crowd sourcing their problems. By making their bug reports and code public, they allow someone like me to fork the project on GitHub, fix the bugs, and issue a pull request back to the master branch. They're basically fine-tuning their product without doing nearly as much work as closed-source shops without paying the person for fixing the problem. To the user, it looks like things get done quickly and bugs tend to come far less often (if the crowd sourcing is done right).

In my humble estimation, these are rather important considerations when judging the success of open source...and these are only web technologies.

treefaceon Nissan Leaf

And in what way do you find JavaScript to be less than "truly" object oriented?

treefaceon Calculus Revisited - a complete self-study calculus course from MIT OCW

Great resource, thanks. Another great resource is, of course, the Khan Academy. See their precalc videos here:

http://www.khanacademy.org/#Precalculus

And their calc videos here:

http://www.khanacademy.org/#Calculus

treefaceon Nissan Leaf

"true object oriented architecture"? I agree with that, but what are you comparing it to?

treefaceon Can you use PHP without frameworks nowadays?

Yeah, I agree fully. The guy who wrote this article appears to be completely oblivious to CodeIgniter, which is a very, very lightweight framework. I just recently revisited an old CI site I made months ago and it only took about 5 minutes to relearn the whole structure of the site. My controllers are thinner and more beautiful than supermodels, my views are extremely light and logically distributed, and my models are the only places (aside from my JavaScript) where I make reference to any data. When your controllers have one line that gets AJAX data, another line that determines if it's a new item or an existing one, and one more line to die() off the direct result of my model call...life becomes a hell of a lot easier and coding an application becomes an exercise in beautiful abstract thought instead of tedious tinkering.

treefaceon 80% of browsers need a patch

Why the blogspam? Just link directly to the article:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9209958/Bulk_of_brows...

treefaceon Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review

Q: What makes Experts Exchange different from other Q&A sites on the Internet?

A: Most of our nearly 3 million solutions revolve around specific technology questions, and the majority of those have a sense of urgency to them.

Huh? How does this differ from StackOverflow? Other than, of course, that those answers are hidden behind a paywall.

We switched to a premium model to keep out of the Venture Capital business (been there, done that, got the t-shirt). Companies like StackExchange couldn't do it without the VC cookie jar. Where's the model? Huh, Spolsky? (I’m sorry. Did that slip out?)

Maybe he hasn't noticed the ads running on every SO page? Or perhaps he doesn't know anything about how careers.stackoverflow.com's billing works (https://careers.stackoverflow.com/billing/checkoutnew)?

I hate saying things like this because it puts me into a position where it looks like I'm saying too much sooth, but it kind of looks like the EE guys are starting to miss the paradigm shift that's occurred and probably will continue to occur in "long-tailed" question and answer sites.

treefaceon Disqus vs. Proprietary?

This discussion might be of value to you:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2500716/open-source-comme...

There are also lots of other discussions related to this on SO.

In my opinion: with disqus you get to be lazy. That's fine. I use it on my personal site. I don't think it allows for infinite branching (like on Reddit), but that requires a pretty nifty nosql solution, were you to do it on your own.

treefaceon Official Google Research Blog: Julia meets HTML 5

I've actually gone down this path before, but I gave up when I asked this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3644614/what-might-be-the...

Client input cannot reasonably well be verified, of course, but perhaps more importantly, once you get down to a certain zoom level, the advantages of caching the information almost disappears as the number of possible X, Y, and zoom levels starts increasing rapidly toward infinity.

The other problem is that JavaScript has issues with very precise floating points and very high integers. Check out this Mandelbrot viewer that I made:

http://janhartigan.com/creations/fractaljs

(please be kind...my site is still under construction [where's my gif??])

It might take a little while to render, but if you keep zooming in (and upping the iteration value in the input box), you'll find that eventually things just start getting pixelated once JS reaches its maximum level of floating point precision.

treefaceon Google algorithm change launched

I can't seem to replicate this:

http://i.imgur.com/kDwPd.png

Are you sure there isn't something else going on?

treefaceon Poll: Where do you work?

How would you even begin to collect the data necessary to make an informed decision on this?

treefaceon 2010 Color Trends

Of course...I don't mean to imply that you could have put together any real meaningful time series data in such a short period of time. I only mean to inspire you to do it in the future ;-)

treefaceon 2010 Color Trends

But we're an inspiration company.

And what greater inspiration for knowledge is there than properly-gathered statistics? All I'm saying is that you guys could do a lot of interesting things if you relied more on well-selected samples over multiple time series. I don't think your post was at all bad, but it leaves me begging for more information.

treefaceon 2010 Color Trends

I remember when colourlovers.com came out with a similar post a few months back and I said something like this:

http://www.colourlovers.com/business/blog/2010/10/26/color-o...

And so while this is still a nice, shiny piece of infographic eye candy, I don't really see the scientific basis behind any of this. It still seems like cherry-picked data to me. Why does it matter that these companies' colors be analyzed compared to any of the thousands of others that were successful in the last year?

treefaceon IE9 beta's HTML5 support isn't there yet: 3 big canvas gotchas

From a personal perspective, I find it highly impressive that their dev team can get stuff pushed out that quickly. Please don't get me wrong in that respect. But what you and I think is cool and impressive matters very little in a highly competitive market.

And I think it's also important to note that I'm not talking about speed of feature releases. I'm talking about speed of general releases. New Chrome features often go from conception to stable release in 2-3 months because of the development structure in which they are released. I wouldn't at all be surprised if the IE team have worked out these canvas issues already, but they just haven't released it (which is why I mentioned that the last beta release was in September).